Hide The Women And Children

You’ll recall that the title of our weekly wrap last week was “Different Week, Same Joke.”

Here’s what we said last Friday:

Another week and the same joke continues to apply: this was the worst week for the Trump administration since last week.

Well, this week easily eclipsed last week as the craziest 5-day stretch yet for Trump and for an administration that has careened completely off the tracks. It was also a terrible week for stocks. Specifically, this was the worst week for the Nasdaq since January 2016.

Nasdaq

Let’s just call it minus 1,500 on the Dow since the immediate knee-jerk spike post-Fed:

DowFuts

VIX highest since March 2:

VIX

Hide the women and children.

Since Monday, Trump:

announced new tariffs on China eliciting an immediate response from Beijing and tanking markets from New York to London to Hong Kong as trade war threat morphed into trade war reality

lost the lead lawyer on the Mueller investigation

lost his National Security adviser

suggested he was willing to fight Joe Biden

threatened to veto a spending bill ahead of a government shutdown only to take it back hours later

Then, in a fitting end to a characteristically insane week, he held a press conference before signing the bill that he initially threatened to veto and used that press conference to talk up America’s military in a comically absurd rant the highlights of which include the following:

“Total stealth. They’re hard to find, they’re hard to see, therefore they’re hard to beat. It’s very tough to beat a plane when you can’t see it.” pic.twitter.com/yXBePQiOtD

— Dave Brown (@dave_brown24) March 23, 2018

Again – crazy. Completely, and totally crazy. No one has used that kind of language to talk about America’s nuclear arsenal since the goddamn Cold War.